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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24541966">Ashes to Ashes</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiltedspacemittens/pseuds/quiltedspacemittens'>quiltedspacemittens</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Good Omens (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bible Quotes, Crowley is an orange ball of nerves, M/M, if i may be so pretentious, it's freeform everything, prose poetry</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 11:09:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,143</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24541966</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiltedspacemittens/pseuds/quiltedspacemittens</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Crowley walks in St. James's Park, thinks of water.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>59</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>CW for mentions of disease epidemics, but nothing graphic or detailed.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>St. James’s Park, London</p><p>1862</p><p>Aziraphale leaves the park first.</p><p>Crowley is silent, stock-still as Aziraphale stomps off, his steps hasty and ill-considered, tan brogues smothering the grass. That dusty, dirt-road brown. Crowley had always found the hue of them distasteful. He sees it, on the heels of smart businessmen, vicars wanting a change from black, and he thinks of drought. Of sandy desert, forked tongue salt-dry.<em> Dirt will you eat.</em></p><p>On Aziraphale, he thinks of shade, of shelter, a respite from the sun. Of sod-houses nestled in between the whistling prairie grasses. Wax paper in the windows, casting parchment-dimmed light against the mudearth wall.</p><p>The brogues are the darkest part of Aziraphale’s dated costume. They are in contact with the Earth, telegraphing his movements. <em>Here I am</em>. Crowley lays his ear to the ground, can hear him better through soil than through air. He digs, carves out a space to listen for Aziraphale, to translate the Morse code of his footfalls. A tapped-out symphony of dots and dashes.  </p><p>His own boots are black, and they are thin-soled. He feels every change in texture under his feet. <em>On your belly will you crawl</em>. The boots are expensive, made to be worn by men who do not work, who do not touch the harshness of the Earth. They drift above its surface, on Persian rugs and the plush of their boxes at the opera, the red-carpeted hulls of carriages, well-tended garden paths.</p><p>Crowley had chosen this particular shoe because he aspired not to work for a living.</p><p>“Some living,” he mutters, replaying Aziraphale’s righteous fury, the graze of kid-gloved fingers on his palm as he handed Aziraphale the slip of paper, crease down the middle.</p><p>“They’ll destroy you,” Aziraphale had said, the lines of his face contorting in and up, folding shut, like quires in a playbook. Slice across the top with your penknife, divide the leaves. <em>I will put enmity between you. </em>They were from the same stock, originally. Pages cut from the same sheet.</p><p>“I know,” Crowley retorts now, aloud, scaring several ducks into rifling up their feathers. “Was going to happen sooner or later.” He thinks of the fine stationery he’d miracled up, cut into thin strips with unsteady hands. He wrote “holy water” out, over and over. Different pens, different fonts. Scrutinized his exhibits with a paleographer’s eye, selected the one the most studiedly casual. Blocky, lower-case letters.</p><p>Aziraphale had cast it out. The scrap had fluttered on the breeze in a slow spiral, meandering more than falling. <em>Sauntering vaguely downwards</em>.</p><p>Aziraphale had marched off, then. Crowley counts his steps in his head. He knows exactly the route Aziraphale will take, returning to the bookshop. There is nowhere else for him to go. He will step in time with the gravel path, the thousands of tiny little stones. They get in Crowley’s boots, they poke against the thinflap soles, his walking stick lands on them just wrong every time. Bowstrings snapping underfoot. A thorn in the flesh. Aziraphale will not feel a thing.</p><p>Crowley releases his iron grip on the spindly, black-chipped railing. He claps his hands together to brush off the chalky rust. The motion kicks up eddies of dust, a sandstorm contained between his two human hands. For a moment, something sparks in him, he remembers the feeling of creation, the gentle, persistent tug of it at his heartstrings. Filling the ocean with a pipette, drop by blessed drop. <em>God saw what he had made, and it was good. </em>But the kindling doesn’t catch, and the spark winks out. The dust smears, spreads itself across the leather, goes dark and lifeless.</p><p>Crowley uproots himself, forces his branch-graft legs into motion. He keeps to the grass, does not touch the footpath, not with his thin, betraying shoes. He is walking in the opposite direction of his house in Mayfair. He thinks of Aziraphale crossing the street with bullish stubbornness, blind to carriages or horses or hackney carts.</p><p>He picks his way across the main path with a quickset, fallible caution. Walks on across the grass, across its trim soldier’s haircut. No sideburns, not like what Crowley is sporting now. He doesn’t like the feel of hair over his snake tattoo. It doesn’t feel like scales. It feels like he is being stifled, somehow.</p><p>It was the first time, ever, that he’d seen Aziraphale with facial hair. He’d always been clean-shaven. He never minded how it made him stand out, appear overly youthful, fussy and indulgent. Crowley had wanted to run his fingers through the unruly blond curls, memorize their texture, stroke them like an ermine fur, reserved for royalty. Let his ungloved hands ghost over Aziraphale’s soft, round cheeks. He hadn’t. He hadn’t soiled Aziraphale’s newfound modishness, hadn’t snuffed out his smile with leaden fingers.</p><p>Crowley pats over his own coarse sideburns, from ear to chin. They’re too boxy, he thinks, too polygonal and angular. Aziraphale’s just begin to curve, follow the line of his jawbone. They’re amorphous, yet shapely. He sniffs disdainfully. Crowley had experience, dabbling in fashions that changed like the tides, but never Aziraphale. Military adherence to uniform. Crowley sneers.</p><p>He thinks of Aziraphale arriving back at the bookshop, slamming the door. The old glass windowpanes rattle like snaketails.</p><p>He exits the park out the eastern gate, leaves the haven of a green space in a rapidly growing city. Abandons the garden that has sheltered them all these years. Rejects the shade of the fruit trees.</p><p>He has half a mind to cross to the South Bank, where he and Aziraphale had seen so many plays, crowded among the groundlings. The theaters were closed by plague, again and again. And yet people packed in, arm to sweaty arm, offering up their pennies on Saturday afternoons. They breathed in the same air, the same water-logged atmosphere, tasting of salt and idle prayers and cheap brown ink. Air laden with humanity, immersive and diseased. Your life might be done and dusted in twenty-four hours, but two of them would be spent distracted. It was worth the risk of destruction.</p><p>Crowley can still smell the miasma of Aziraphale on him, the laundry scent. Something clean, something fresh, something unstained. Scrubbed raw and pink against a washboard. He does not smell like lye, heavy-duty, harsh soap. Crowley thinks of the intact skin on his hands, unstripped by lye, untarnished by holiness, by an angel’s greying laundry water.</p><p>He walks across the thoroughfare of Broad Street, remembers finding Aziraphale mucking out cesspools in the middle of the night. He was covered in grime and refuse, leaning on a shovel, when Crowley found him. Aziraphale didn’t complain about the state of his waistcoat. There were children sick. The cesspools were contaminating the pumps. His hands were tarred with acid. Their lives were frivolities. Aziraphale told him it didn’t hurt.</p><p>He gave Crowley directions in a brooked undertone. Crowley lounged by the pumps in dark sunglasses, miracling wellbuckets. He did not know what Aziraphale meant by these tiny inhabitants of water, but he struck them dead all the same. He cursed the water clean. <em>Save us from the fires of Hell. </em>He only muddied waters, blackened them with his silt. He stirred up the peaceful riverbeds. They coughed themselves up, blanketed the fields, receded inexorably slowly. Dragging their nails against the surface of the Earth, marking out territory with gangrened stickfingers.</p><p>Crowley crosses London Bridge. Aziraphale had wanted to live on it, two hundred years back. A four-story house, leaning across the way to conspire with its neighbors. Aziraphale had wanted a river for a garden. He’d never liked tending plants, never trusted his own sturdytine fingers. Here, he could look out his back window and feel the steady heartbeat of the river, untilled. His broad, soft palms would bless the barges and flatboats, the passengers paying their tolls.</p><p>One gold coin, one bottle of holy water, to have and to hold, not with bare hands.</p><p>The bridge is empty, now. Crowley leans out over the edge, farther than he should, farther than he would if Aziraphale were here. He tries to see the bottom, to sound out the depths in the twilight, when night touches day. <em>Evening came and morning followed</em>.</p><p>He thinks of grappling for the streambed of the River Styx, desperate for an anchor, blood rushing to his head. He thinks of surfacing empty-handed and invincible, but for one chink at his ankle. <em>You will strike at her heel. </em>How has he never thought to armor it? To armor himself against a sea of troubles. The river gurgles, flowing out from under him.</p><p>He could walk to the sea. It is not far, not for him. He could walk, southeast as the river widens, wait until it reaches the endless saltflat water, the unpaved whale-road. He might encounter sea monsters there, Leviathan and the Kraken, hellthings lurking in the wine-darkness.</p><p>He does not move from the center of the bridge. Around him, candles and oil lanterns are extinguished. The taverns are letting out. He thinks of sleep, of Morpheus in the underworld. Taking the form of the long serpent. Eternal sleep (perchance to dream). Sloth was a vice, work was a virtue. Look at what work had given them. Crowley thinks of children, small enough to fit in the northern mine shafts, big enough to work spinning mules. He thinks of children hauling water from the Thames. The river stinks of sewage.</p><p>He thinks of Aeschylus, <em>even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget. </em> He turns around, never makes it to the burnt-out rubble of the Globe. <em>All the men and women merely players. </em>(What then of angels and demons?) One cannon misfired, and the thatching catches, the whole world gone to ashes.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Berate me for treating London geography as a suggestion at <a href="https://theseedsofdoom.tumblr.com"> theseedsofdoom</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Soho, London</p>
<p>2019</p>
<p>Crowley walks, after the Ritz. Aziraphale was drowsy, eyelids drooping, blissfully stuffed on crème brûlée and champagne and disgracefully expensive red wine.</p>
<p>“Rest,” Crowley says, the hiss of exhaustion in his own voice undisguised. He refuses to worry about Aziraphale’s first nap this millennium. <em>Even in our sleep. </em>He swings the car around the corner, the Bentley doing most of the steering. He and Aziraphale live a kilometer apart. One thousand of Crowley’s long-stride steps, one thousand meters. Two hundred pentameters, fourteen sonnets. A sonnet of sonnets, a song of songs. <em>I will go about the city. </em>Soho to Mayfair.</p>
<p>Crowley barely notices the car in his parking spot. A foreign object violating the bounds of his ten feet of blacktop. He had painted the lines himself, two parallel stripes, crisp, blinding white. <em>You were an angel, once. </em>It’s an empty box, a space marked out, reserved for him. A reminder, streaked onto the earth, <em>here I am.</em></p>
<p>The Bentley squeezes in, folds and angles itself. Ties up space in a plait, twists it away. A hair’s width away from the other car’s bumper. Crowley runs a hand over the steering wheel. “Thanks, old girl.” He clamors onto the sidewalk, inspects the parking job. The Bentley is sticks out, crooked, tire on one white line. Hair’s width apart. He thinks of Aziraphale’s hand, on the table at the Ritz. On the armrest on the bus, on every bus. On a thermos, a leather bag handle. A scrap of paper. How many angels could fit on the head of a pin, wedged between their too human hands?</p>
<p>He stands on the pavement, cranes his head up at his flat. He has the penthouse, outfitted with floor to ceiling glass windows, boasting a spectacular view of London. It’s like being on the top carriage of the Eye. Suspended above the fray. He thinks of Heaven, phalanxes marching out of great glass walls, flooding the skies. <em>Take arms against a sea of troubles.</em> He thinks of what he’d find, inside. They’d been there, last night, in his living room, his kitchen, his bedroom with the black silk sheets. He hadn’t let Aziraphale near his office, hadn’t mentioned the goo on the floor, the holy water still pooling and rippling. He’d have to go in eventually, clean it all up, wash it all away. He thinks of surface tension, the meniscus curving downwards. Water bent at the hips, cohering, droplets coming together.</p>
<p>Water molecules come in pairs. An oxygen atom with two hydrogens, bound to another oxygen, with two hydrogens. Piano four hands, pounding out a duet. Four bonds, connected at the shoulders, at the scapula. <em>Save me from the fires of Hell. </em>They were from the same stock, originally. Just add water.  </p>
<p>He thinks of floods, he thinks of deserts.</p>
<p>Crowley walks. His legs will not carry him the length of the city, not anymore. He is drained, the oil siphoned from the engine of him. Nothing left to circulate through his cog-and-gear limbs. A perpetual motion device, ground to a halt. Consumed by entropy. He’s hollowed out, a husk on the inside. His outsides safe, re-formed, his insides split between himself and Aziraphale. Cohering (they are the same). He doesn’t know how to break the surface tension.</p>
<p>There is a bridge in St. James’s Park, high and arched. It’s a romantic spot, popular with couples taking photographs. A manmade stream trickles below. In the spring, ducks nest underneath, in the graffiti-laden shade. The rocks are slippery with moss.</p>
<p>Crowley pulls himself up the steep arch, hunches alone at the top, looks down at the ambling water. He takes off his sunglasses, examines his reflection. His oil-drop eyes. Sleek and poisonous. They darken the sea. Catch flies in amber. Preserver eyes. <em>My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun. </em>He still knows all the words, still knows the cadence, how to slip into iambic pentameter. How to carry the rhythm, beat out the stresses, imitate the heart.</p>
<p>He thinks of Alexandria. Perched atop the lighthouse, the beacon gone dead. Staring down at the wine-dark sea. The Greeks didn’t have a word for blue. Colors come in stages, like staircases, like a recipe. You can’t skip steps.</p>
<p>He glances up at a fountain, across the park. Humans toss coins in them, for luck. He drops a penny, straight down, doesn’t make a wish. No one’s listening. <em>Who, if I cried out?</em></p>
<p>He slumps over the railing. The cabernet sloshes in his stomach. The Greeks might have been on to something. Crowley closes his eyes, seasick. Traps them behind thin-skinned eyelids, wrestles them back underneath his wretched sunglasses. An extra set of doors, an additional guard on the ramparts.</p>
<p>
  <em>Wherever you are, I’ll come to you.</em>
</p>
<p>“Shit.”</p>
<p>He picks himself up, unfolds his bones, collapsed in like a card table, rickety with age. He wobbles a bit, feels gelatinous, like the scaffolding of him is melting, hot in a fire.</p>
<p>He slips more than walks down the other side of the bridge. His feet are a homing beacon, they are in touch with the cold hard earth, with the clay of it, how it used to rub against his stomach. <em>On your belly will you crawl</em>. He’d have liked to have a rattle, a warning sign, <em>here I am. </em></p>
<p>His boots are slip-ons now, fashionable and pragmatic. The gravel on the path infiltrates easily, grinds at his ankles. <em>You will strike at her heel</em>. He doesn’t shake the pebbles out as he walks, thinks of the Red Sea. He was there, blaze-red hair, a column of fire<em>. </em>He is always there, when the dust settles. He is coated with it. The withered rock, sun-dried, clings to the fine hair on his forearms. It settles on him, eases itself supine. A second set of scales.</p>
<p>The bookshop looms in front of him, suddenly. Crowley runs his hands along the bricks reverently, staggering. He thinks of unearthing clay, laying it in brickmolds with creator hands, thinks of ribs. How proud he was, to make bricks. To scrape together the surplus, give out little figurines to children. He’d show them how to shape them with their thumbs.  </p>
<p>He falls into the bookshop, doesn’t touch the doorknob, no memory of the steps. He sways in place, sunglasses drooping off his nose.</p>
<p>“Crowley!” Aziraphale calls out in surprise, from the sofa. He’s in the dusk-dark, shades drawn. Alone, stock-still, unoccupied. Crowley can see him through the skew of his sunglasses, darker in one eye than the other.</p>
<p>Crowley walks. He twines himself around the bookshelves, close-pressed. Dim, narrow, humid, packed. He files past at speed, runs his fingers along the spines, glances at the titles, light-headed from trying to focus his eyes.</p>
<p>Aziraphale finds him, deep in the stacks. They extend back farther than he recalled. The shelves sparkle as if they’re brand new. They are, he remembers. Aziraphale catches his arm.</p>
<p>“No dust,” Crowley says. Thinks of tearing his whole flat down, brick by brick. An observation deck in the sky. They’d come for Aziraphale there. They’d wanted to hurt him. <em>Remember you are dust.</em></p>
<p>“Not yet.” Aziraphale smiles. “I’ll let it build up.”</p>
<p>Crowley’s legs are skidding beneath him, still trying to lead him somewhere, as if over ice. On the rocks. Wine-dark water, desalinated. Wavemotion frozen out of them, molded into cubes. “Thought you were sleeping.”</p>
<p>“Why’d you come, then?”</p>
<p>Crowley shrugs, a fluid motion, like oil rippling. “Fancied a walk.”</p>
<p>“Here.” Aziraphale reaches out, starts to steer him toward the couch.</p>
<p>Crowley’s whole body shakes. His knees about to give out. “Gimme a minute.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale’s brow furrows. “Are you alright?”</p>
<p>“Course.” Crowley turns, back into the stacks, circling the shelves. Chasing his own tail, trying to pin the rattle on it. <em>Here I am. </em></p>
<p>Aziraphale stands, forlorn, wrings his hands.</p>
<p>Crowley can’t bear it. <em>Wherever you are, I’ll come to you.</em></p>
<p>His legs buckle, he crumples like desiccated clay. <em>To dust you shall return</em>.</p>
<p>Aziraphale catches him, scoops him off the ground, stills his restless legs. They sit. Aziraphale holds him, quiets him against the sofa. Wipes the scales from his eyes.</p>
<p>Crowley thinks of flames. He does not think of ashes. He never got that far. He clutches Aziraphale’s hand. Cohering. Bonded so tightly they overlap. Crowley thinks of water, of briny ocean waves, of human-dug riverbeds. He thinks of stock. Just add water. He nestles his head into Aziraphale’s jacket, drinks in the calm of him. He’s come to shore, found the coast of the wine-dark sea, the malleable sand there. He knows now how to unite the desert and the ocean, the drought and the flood. I will build you a castle, here, he thinks. I will dig you a moat. He will fill the rockpools of the intertidal zone, stand firm against the pull of the current. He will puncture the surface tension, with his own Devil-given teeth. The beads of water scatter, pearls rolling off a snapped string. The tide goes in and out, like breath. Hearts and wings and lungs. <em>So we beat on.</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon our hearts, until in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."-Aeschylus, <i>Oresteia,</i> trans. Edith Hamilton</p>
<p>Most of the quotes here are from Genesis, but I would be remiss not to acknowledge 1 Samuel and Song of Songs. Shakespeare and Rilke and Fitzgerald too. </p>
<p>Thanks for reading. Berate me for ignoring the layout of Aziraphale's bookshop on <a href="https://theseedsofdoom.tumblr.com">tumblr.</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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